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If a chef has nailed vegan bagels and decadent desserts, I have to eat them… don’t I?


I am about to put on weight. I know it’s coming. I know I need to do something about it. I know I will do nothing about it.

I have just started filming on a sitcom and the catering is unbelievable, and it is going to be a problem, and that problem stems from the fact that the chef is brilliant at doing vegan food. I arrived on the first morning and was informed that they had a vegan bagel: sausage, avocado, spinach and cream cheese, or cheeze. It sounds like exactly the sort of thing you’d enjoy as a treat every now and again. I have one every morning.

Then there’s lunch. There is always a perfectly crafted hot lunch. This is obviously great. The issue is, the chef has nailed vegan desserts. When somebody tells you they have done a vegan dessert, they normally mean they have done you a fruit salad. You then have to sit next to people eating a chocolate gateau, and listen to them making orgasmic noises while you insist that you really did fancy a palate-cleanser. This chef doesn’t do that. He does hot apple pie and custard, and sticky toffee pudding, and type 2 diabetes.

This is almost as big a problem as having no dessert. He has gone to the effort of doing vegan desserts, and I am the only vegan on the shoot. Can you imagine bothering to try to replicate a dairy-free version of a decadent dessert, discovering on some obscure website that you can make a passable custard if you blend almond milk with nutmeg, vanilla essence and a false sense of superiority – only to find that the prick you’re making it for is watching his weight. I have to eat the dessert: not for my own enjoyment, but to show my heartfelt appreciation of the chef’s efforts.

The recent increase in vegan products now looks like a problem. I became vegan six years ago, when the free-from aisle in Tesco was a relative wasteland. You would go to have a look, knowing that they would have just the one tub of nutritional yeast, and that in order to get that, you’d have to wrestle a white guy with dreads. This was paradise compared with the market for the vegans of 20 years ago, the Jedis of the movement. They couldn’t have imagined a future where nut milks would be booming and Piers Morgan would rage about vegan sausage rolls in another one of his pieces where he pretends to have an opinion about something other than himself. The old-school vegans had to live off dry Weetabix and a hatred of omnivores.

Why am I worried about my weight? I guess it’s vanity. I remember once being at the shops with my wife, seeing myself in a mirror, and saying to her: “I didn’t realise I looked so fat in this T-shirt, we need to go home right now.” But it’s not even about looking good; it’s about not looking too shit. It’s about still being able to fit into my costume at the end of this sitcom shoot. It’s about not coming out of the bathroom and having my son say: “You’ve got big boobies, Daddy.”

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Action needs to be taken. I have decided, along with the rest of the cast, to try intermittent fasting. This means that we can eat what we want during filming, up to a certain point in the afternoon, and then fast for the rest of the day until the bagel is delivered the next morning.

We have been doing it for two weeks now, and the feeling of solidarity has really helped; there is a shared positivity that we’re staying on top of things. Which is why I feel bad about informing the rest of the cast, via this column, that I have actually been going home after work and eating a huge dinner every evening. I am also seriously thinking about having two bagels every morning. You can never have enough cheeze.